You have to consider, that with better hardware you'll not just get better looking games, but also better games in general.Nowadays you have a lot of linear games and practically no open world games on consoles. The simple reason for this is the memory constraint on consoles. This forces developers to design their games like small hallways instead of wide open landscapes.Now imagine this constraint wouldn't exist anymore and suddenly we would get all kinds of new games where developers could implement all their ideas they had for years now.I follow a lot of game developers on twitter and a lot of them can't wait for the new consoles to come out. They are eager to learn something new.Programmers don't want to do the same stuff year after year after year. They are happy if they get a new toy to play around with. It's fun for them to fgure out how to get the best performance out of this new thing.

Regarding the streaming idea. I don't think, that streaming is the future. In times where players complain about pings greater then 20 ms, monitors with input lags due to overdrive techniques and jerky mouse movemovements because the 125 Hz polling rate of the usb bus isn't high enough, you can't stream games with latencies up to 100ms or even more. It's simply too laggy.It would work fine for games like The Sims or Chess, but definately not for First Person Shooter games. Just ask gamers about their experience with OnLive.Also. Not everyone has a high speed Internet connection. A lot of people still just want to play offline.

That's one of the new features the Xbox will probably get. I guess it will be optional, but i think it's awesome.The Kinect scans your room and a projector is then able to project game content into your room as some kind of an perifferal effect. It's even able to render around or directly onto your furniture if you want.

I don't think that you'll get to see flash media as a distribution medium very soon.

You can press a disk for a few cents at very high production speeds, while flash dirves still cost one or two bucks a piece and require a lot of time to be written. Therefore mass production costs will be much much higher.

It's far more likely, that you'll get a console without any media drive at all, where you can get your games and movies only by digital distribution.

@IRB

Gamedevs will still release games for the 360, even if a new consoles are out. The market is still too huge to be ignored.

For example: DICE already announced, that Battlefield 4 will be out for the Xbox 360, Xbox Next, PS3, PS Next and the PC. It's financially not viable to leave to old consoles behind.

Smaller developers, who are just gotten familiar with the old consoles, might not even start developing for the new consoles at all and stick with the old ones, because they already invested so much know how in it.

Of course we need a new Xbox. The current console generation are hampering game development for a very long time now. PC gaming has >10 times to power of the consoles, but developers can't really use it because they have to develop cross-platform games that also have to run on those ancient consoles.

512 MB of combined RAM and VRAM is a joke. Developers can't do anything with it anymore.

We finally need some 64 Bit consoles with DX 11.1 GPUs and lot's of Ram. Preferably 8 GB of it. Once we got those our games would get better immediately.

You finally get Full HD or even 4k resolution and most likely stereoscopic rendering @ 120 Hz. Games will look a lot better and you'll get new features like the Kinect 2, augmented reality glasses, a holographic projection of the game and a lot more.

In other words. New consoles are long overdue.

(It's not like you have to throw your old Xbox out if the new ones come out.)

@Luna: I totally agree and i just watched Herbs video about C++, where he said, that all three languages are roughly on par with each other in terms of complexity.

His conclusion is also based on the page count of the spec papers, which is strangely enough a little different then mine.

I guess this shows, that this isn't really an accurate form to measure the complexity of a language. I think that your assessment of the three languages is pretty much on point and most people would agree with it just by experience.